Wow, that sure was a short month!
________________________________________________
Bryan, I still don't understand why you are going on about the height of the trees. Last I was measured I was around 6' 3" and from that height I find it rather difficult of for me to see over the top of anything close to 6' tall and taller. Whether the trees were 20 feet or 200 feet, they were plenty tall enough to block the view, provided the coverage was thick enough. Some seem to think these these Philly guys were larger than life, but I doubt that even George Crump was 40 feet tall.
______________________________________________
Jim,
I appreciate your comments about Mike above, but would suggest that you aren't quite acknowledging the bigger picture.
I agree that Mike is passionate, and I agree that he is probably not trying to be intentionally dishonest. But for these conversations to work we need more than just mindless passion and over exuberance The parties must possess the willingness and ability to deal with the source material in good faith, and with some minimal attempt at objectivity. Mike has repeatedly failed on both counts, hasn't he?
While you may not like it when Patrick comes right out and calls him a liar, Cirba's constant twisting and stretching the source material to suit his argument is not honest, is it? How about his constant hyperbole about the state of the facts and discussion, and his repeated gross exaggerations regarding everyone else's position?
Just a bit above he wrote, "This myth created and perpetuated here that they were dealing with some Amazonian forest is rather at odds with all the evidence." Is he being honest there? Or is he engaged in his usual sarcasm, misrepresentation, and hyperbole to try and misrepresent the views of those with whom he disagrees in an attempt to advance his point without actually or honestly dealing with the record or the positions of others? How about his recent about-face on the issue of the state of the land prior to Crump clearing it? We have multiple reports it was a forest before Crump cleared the land for the course. But then I posted the oblique from 1931 showing the density of the surrounding woods, Mike simply switched course and began arguing that this all reflected new growth, and that actually the land must have been cleared before Crump found it. Huh? Where is there any indication in the source material that the land had already been cleared? Doesn't it fly in the face of just about everything written at the time? Don't all the descriptions indicate the opposite? Mike just made it up, didn't he? Is this really an honest good faith effort on his part to objective address the arguments and source material? Or is it desperately and disingenuously grasping at anything and everything to try and prop up his position? Can we call it lying? I am not sure, but is certainly doesn't seem to be an honest, above board, or productive.
And you claim he is trying to move the conversation forward? Isn't it more accurate to say that Mike is always anxious (over-anxious) to move the conversation toward HIS conclusion and only his confusion? And that he will move toward this conclusions whether the facts and analysis support this or not? I really don't see this as an honest attempt to move the conversation forward, and I don't think you do either. Look at what has just happened over the past few days for goodness sake. Mike announced he was leaving for a month and we would all see how I go after others besides him. I, for one, was looking forward to it. But he couldn't even make it two hours without posting! Two hours! And by the next day he was not only posting, he was posting so much that was he burying his own posts, then reposting his old posts over the top of his own posts because he apparently thinks so much of his posts that he is afraid we will miss the 27th time he has repeated some article or another. It seems to me that when he starts reposting old posts over the top of his own posts, and no one else has even posted, he might have a problem. And now, like so many inconvenient facts he has managed to forget, his grand gesture of not posting for a month is not even a distant memory.
And while I agree with you that Mike gets an awful lot wrong, there is much more to it that this. It is also how he is wrong, and what he is wrong about. Remember a few months ago when he was repeatedly posting LIES about my dealings with Merion Golf Club? I told him repeatedly he needed to stop and that he was wrong, yet he kept at it, insisting that his information was correct, and suggesting that I was lying about my dealings with the club. With Cirba and Brauer were spreading these lies around here (and accusing me of lying) and the other two going after me offline with the same bullshit, I eventually had to contact Merion in order to set the record straight.
I don't know about you, but I have trouble writing off his extremely reckless, irresponsible, and damaging false accusations and misrepresentations to "passion," especially because Cirba has done this same sort thing to me over and over again. Somehow I think if you were in my position, you might not be so generous with your "passion" excuse.
And while you may think this is off-topic, it isn't. Even now, in this thread, he is still going after everyone's motivations and has been from the beginning. It isn't just that he is very often wrong, it is the constant hyperbole, the repeated mischaracterizations of the positions of others, the exaggerations, the sarcasm, and the endless attacks on everyone else's motives. It is the same thing he does with all his witch hunts. He takes a half-truth or even a flat out misrepresentation, and not only runs with it, he tries to use it to trash everyone else. It is one thing to be wrong, but it is quite another to be wrong while simultaneously carrying on about how ridiculous is the opposition and/or how we are all just motivated by a petty agenda.
Don't believe me? See for yourself. While I really don't understand why, one of the issues here is whether to believe the AWT train story or the hunting story. Whichever one believes (if either) is not as if Tom MacWood just made up the hunting story. There are multiple accounts from reliable sources. Yet, as usual, Mike is absolutely certain the AWT must we correct. I think he is probably wrong, but I don't really care about that. What I object to is HOW he goes about it. If Mike believes the AWT story, then in his mind anyone who would believe otherwise is not only wrong, there position is ridiculously irrational and they are agenda driven, biased, pathetic, idiots, historical revisionists, etc. Here are just a few Cirba quotes from before I was actively engaged in the thread:
Jeez, Guys... A cynic might suggest that you are both trying to cast doubt on the credibility of poor ole Tilly, simply because his close connections with the game and contemporaneous crediting of Wilson at Merion and Crump at Pine Valley back then flies in the face of your attempts at revisionist history of Philadelphia golf 100 years later. Just saying...
. . .
Your bias in these matters is beyond comprehension and is clearly clouding your ability to accurately analyze the materials in question.
. . .
I know you desperately want to discredit Tillinghast as a source because he directly and contemporaneously upsets your "anybody but Wilson" theory at Merion and your "Only Colt" theory at Pine Valley, but I for one am thankful that he was on the scene and told us accurately what happened in each case.
. . .
Sadly, your biases have become obvious and pathetic and your positions have reached the point of absurdity.
. . .
If I see wild, unfounded speculation and I know the facts are different, I prefer to simply put those facts forward and leave it to others to find the truth.
. . .
I know you guys absolutely hate what Tillinghast wrote about Merion and Pine Valley because his contemporaneous accounts effectively kibosh your attempts to change history to your liking. I can't help that, but understand how it can be frustrating to you.
. . .
It is absurdly illogical to think he was lying and you'd have to be an idiot not to see the landform from the train.
. . .
You do realize you've done a 180 here from your very reasonable, thoughtful former interpretation to this new extreme position designed to discredit Tillinghast, probably spurred on by Patrick's latest bout of madness motivated to goad Tom Paul to come back here on GCA.
That from the first THREE pages only. Before I was actively involved. It goes on throughout. In more posts than not.
Is Mike being honest here? Is the hunting story really "unfounded speculation" and so unreasonable so as to justify all of this? Or is Mike blatantly mischaracterizing the nature of the discussion and the underlying facts?
And what if it turns out that Mike is wrong? (Let's be honest here, he usually is.) Will he learn anything? Will he apologize to all he insulted? Will he try hard next time to not jump to conclusions and attack others based on emotion rather than facts? Will he finally realize that there is skill and sound methodology involved in historical analysis, and actually try to learn something? Or will he just move on to the next issue and do it all over again and exactly in the same manner?